A C O M P A N I O N T O

THE H ISTORY OF THE BOOK

EDI T ED BY

S I MON E L IO T A N D JONAT H A N RO SE

A Companion to the History of the Book

A Companion to the History of the Book

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

Published 1. A Companion to Romanticism Edited by Duncan Wu2. A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture Edited by Herbert F. Tucker3. A Companion to Shakespeare Edited by David Scott Kastan4. A Companion to the Gothic Edited by David Punter5. A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare Edited by Dympna Callaghan6. A Companion to Chaucer Edited by Peter Brown7. A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake Edited by David Womersley8. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture Edited by Michael Hattaway9. A Companion to Milton Edited by Thomas N. Corns

10. A Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry Edited by Neil Roberts11. A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture Edited by Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne12. A Companion to Restoration Drama Edited by Susan J. Owen13. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing Edited by Anita Pacheco14. A Companion to Renaissance Drama Edited by Arthur F. Kinney15. A Companion to Victorian Poetry Edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison16. A Companion to the Victorian Novel Edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing17–20. A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Volumes I–IV Edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard21. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America Edited by Charles L. Crow22. A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism Edited by Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted23. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Edited by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson24. A Companion to American Fiction 1780–1865 Edited by Shirley Samuels25. A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914 Edited by Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson26. A Companion to Digital Humanities Edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and

John Unsworth27. A Companion to Romance Edited by Corinne Saunders28. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 Edited by Brian W. Shaffer29. A Companion to Twentieth-century American Drama Edited by David Krasner30. A Companion to the Eighteenth-century English Novel and Culture Edited by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia31. A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture Edited by Rory McTurk32. A Companion to Tragedy Edited by Rebecca Bushnell33. A Companion to Narrative Theory Edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz34. A Companion to Science Fiction Edited by David Seed35. A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America Edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer36. A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance Edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen37. A Companion to Mark Twain Edited by Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd38. A Companion to European Romanticism Edited by Michael K. Ferber39. A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture Edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar40. A Companion to Walt Whitman Edited by Donald D. Kummings41. A Companion to Herman Melville Edited by Wyn Kelley42. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350–c.1500 Edited by Peter Brown43. A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: 1880–2005 Edited by Mary Luckhurst44. A Companion to Eighteenth-century Poetry Edited by Christine Gerrard45. A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets Edited by Michael Schoenfeldt46. A Companion to Satire Edited by Ruben Quintero47. A Companion to William Faulkner Edited by Richard C. Moreland48. A Companion to the History of the Book Edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

A C O M P A N I O N T O

THE H ISTORY OF THE BOOK

EDI T ED BY

S I MON E L IO T A N D JONAT H A N RO SE

© 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltdexcept for editorial material and organization © 2007 by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

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First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2007

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A companion to the history of the book / edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. p. cm.—(Blackwell companions to literature and culture ; 48)

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-2765-3 (alk. paper)

1. Books—History. 2. Printing—History. 3. Book industries and trade—History. I. Eliot, Simon. II. Rose, Jonathan, 1952–

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Contents

List of Illustrations viiiNotes on Contributors x

Introduction 1Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

Part I Methods and Approaches 7

1 Why Bibliography Matters 9T. H. Howard-Hill

2 What is Textual Scholarship? 21David Greetham

3 The Uses of Quantifi cation 33Alexis Weedon

4 Readers: Books and Biography 50Stephen Colclough

Part II The History of the Material Text 63

The World before the Codex 65

5 The Clay Tablet Book in Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia 67Eleanor Robson

6 The Papyrus Roll in Egypt, Greece, and Rome 84Cornelia Roemer

The Book beyond the West 95

7 China 97J. S. Edgren

8 Japan, Korea, and Vietnam 111Peter Kornicki

9 South Asia 126Graham Shaw

10 Latin America 138Hortensia Calvo

11 The Hebraic Book 153Emile G. L. Schrijver

12 The Islamic Book 165Michael Albin

The Codex in the West 400–2000 177

13 The Triumph of the Codex: The Manuscript Book before 1100 179Michelle P. Brown

14 Parchment and Paper: Manuscript Culture 1100–1500 194M. T. Clanchy

15 The Gutenberg Revolutions 207Lotte Hellinga

16 The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Century 220David J. Shaw

17 The British Book Market 1600–1800 232John Feather

18 Print and Public in Europe 1600–1800 247Rietje van Vliet

19 North America and Transatlantic Book Culture to 1800 259Russell L. Martin III

20 The Industrialization of the Book 1800–1970 273Rob Banham

21 From Few and Expensive to Many and Cheap: The British Book Market 1800–1890 291Simon Eliot

22 A Continent of Texts: Europe 1800–1890 303Jean-Yves Mollier and Marie-Françoise Cachin

23 Building a National Literature: The United States 1800–1890 315Robert A. Gross

24 The Globalization of the Book 1800–1970 329David Finkelstein

25 Modernity and Print I: Britain 1890–1970 341Jonathan Rose

vi Contents

26 Modernity and Print II: Europe 1890–1970 354Adriaan van der Weel

27 Modernity and Print III: The United States 1890–1970 368Beth Luey

28 Books and Bits: Texts and Technology 1970–2000 381Paul Luna

29 The Global Market 1970–2000: Producers 395Eva Hemmungs Wirtén

30 The Global Market 1970–2000: Consumers 406Claire Squires

Part III Beyond the Book 419

31 Periodicals and Periodicity 421James Wald

32 The Importance of Ephemera 434Martin Andrews

33 The New Textual Technologies 451Charles Chadwyck-Healey

Part IV Issues 465

34 New Histories of Literacy 467Patricia Crain

35 Some Non-textual Uses of Books 480Rowan Watson

36 The Book as Art 493Megan L. Benton

37 Obscenity, Censorship, and Modernity 508Deana Heath

38 Copyright and the Creation of Literary Property 520John Feather

39 Libraries and the Invention of Information 531Wayne A. Wiegand

Coda 545

40 Does the Book Have a Future? 547Angus Phillips

Index 560

Contents vii

Illustrations

3.1 Number of titles published in nineteenth-century Britain 425.1 Map of ancient Iraq showing major cities 685.2 A Type II tablet from House F 725.3 Scribes using writing boards and parchment 755.4 A tablet from Nineveh recording the myth of the goddess Ishtar’s

descent to the Underworld 765.5 Shamash-êtir’s intellectual network 785.6 A tablet from Hellenistic Uruk 797.1 Standard format of traditional Chinese printed books and manuscripts 987.2 Frontispiece woodcut and initial lines of text of the Jin’gang jing 1047.3 Woodcut scene depicting the late Ming commercial publisher

Yu Xiangdou 1088.1 A page showing chrysanthemums from Genji ikebana ki (1765) 1148.2 A page from the 1797 edition of Chunchu jwa ssi jeon 1208.3 A woodblock-printed school textbook printed in Vietnam in the late

nineteenth century 12317.1 The circuit of the book 23317.2 The book trade in the early seventeenth century 23420.1 The Albion press 27520.2 Koenig printing machine of 1811 27720.3 Hoe’s eight-cylinder printing machine 27820.4 Hoe’s bed-and-platen book-printing machine 27820.5 A double-letter Linotype matrix 28220.6 A line of single-letter Linotype matrices and spacebands 28320.7 A Monotype matrix case 28432.1 William Caxton’s advertisement for Commemorations of Sarum Use,

c.1478 43532.2 Receipt from Robert Allardice, bookseller and stationer, 1831 437

32.3 Bill from Joseph White, bookseller, printer, and stationer, 1830 44032.4 Trade card for W. Porter, bookseller, stationer, and binder, c.1830s 44132.5 Trade card for Bettison, bookseller, publisher, and stationer, c.1830 44232.6 Price list for Roach’s Circulating Library, c.1830 44432.7 Notice from the Wandsworth Public Library, 1889 44532.8 Bookplate, Thomas Burch of Petersfield, early nineteenth century 44632.9 Reward of Merit, c.1860s 44732.10 Packaging label for reading lamp candles, c.1890 44832.11 Advertisement for the “Reading Easel,” c.1870s 44936.1 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 49736.2 Pierre-Simon Fournier, Manuel typographique 49836.3 Geoffrey Chaucer, Works 50036.4 H. C. Andersen, Sneedronningen [The Ice Queen] 50436.5 Tatana Kellner, 71125: Fifty Years of Silence 506

List of Illustrations ix

Notes on Contributors

Michael Albin was an acquisition specialist for Islamic books, most recently as Director of the Library of Congress offi ce in Cairo, Egypt. He is now an independent scholar and teacher of Arabic.

Martin Andrews is a senior lecturer in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where he teaches the history of printing. He is Deputy Director of the Centre for Ephemera Studies at the university and curator of the department’s extensive lettering and printing collections. He is also the author of The Life and Work of Robert Gibbings (2003).

Rob Banham is a lecturer in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communi-cation at the University of Reading, where he teaches the history of graphic communi-cation and practical design. He is Chairman of the Friends of St. Bride Library, and edits and designs The Ephemerist, the journal of the Ephemera Society.

Megan L. Benton is a fellow of the Humanities Faculty at Pacific Lutheran University. She is the author of Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America(2000), and co-editor of Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation(2001).

Michelle P. Brown, formerly Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, is Professor of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. She is also a lay canon and member of the chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Her publications include A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (1990), The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (2003), Painted Labyrinth: The World of the Lindisfarne Gospels (2004), and The World of the Luttrell Psalter (2006).

Marie-Françoise Cachin is Professor Emerita of British Literature and Literary Trans-lation at the University of Paris VII. Her current research and publications concern British publishing in the Victorian period, and she is in charge of a research group working on various aspects of book history in the English-speaking world. She has recently co-edited a special issue of the Cahiers Charles V entitled Histoire(s) de livreswith a preface by Roger Chartier.

Hortensia Calvo has a PhD in Spanish from Yale University (1990) and is currently Doris Stone Director of the Latin American Library at Tulane University. She has pub-lished essays on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish-American chronicles and on the historiography of the early Spanish-American book.

Charles Chadwyck-Healey received an honors degree from Oxford University. In 1973, he founded the Chadwyck-Healey publishing group, which published reprints, micro-forms, CD-ROMs, and online via the Internet in the humanities and social sciences for libraries all over the world. There were Chadwyck-Healey companies in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Spain, and the company was the largest pub-lisher of German literature in electronic form. Now retired, he is a director of openDemocracy.net, writes and takes photographs, and invests in start-up companies, mainly in IT and biotech.

M. T. Clanchy is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is the author of From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (2nd edn., 1993) and Abelard: A Medieval Life (1997).

Stephen Colclough is a lecturer in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature at the School of English, University of Wales, Bangor. He has published widely on the history of reading and text dissemination and is currently completing a monograph entitled Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870.

Patricia Crain is Associate Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000).

J. S. Edgren received his PhD in Sinology from the University of Stockholm. After employment at the Royal Library (National Library of Sweden) in Stockholm, he was active in the antiquarian book trade. Since 1991, he has served as Editorial Director of the Chinese Rare Books Project, an online international union catalogue of Chinese rare books, based at Princeton University. He is writing a book on the history of the book in China.

Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book in the Institute of English Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study in the University of London, and Deputy Director

Notes on Contributors xi

of the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies. He is General Editor of the new multivolume History of Oxford University Press and editor of the journal Publishing History.His publications include Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919 (1994) and Literary Cultures and the Material Book (2007). He was president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing between 1997 and 2001.

John Feather has been Professor of Library and Information Studies at Loughborough University since 1987. He was educated at Oxford, and was the fi rst Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge. His writings on book history include The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-century England (1985), Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (1994), and A History of British Publishing (rev. edn., 2006), as well as many articles in Publishing History and other journals.

David Finkelstein is Research Professor of Media and Print Culture at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh. His publications include The House of Blackwood: Author–Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002), and the co-authored An Introduction to Book History (2005). He has co-edited The Nineteenth-century Media and the Construction of Identities (2000), The Book History Reader (rev. edn., 2006), and The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, 1880–2000 (2007).

David Greetham is Distinguished Professor of English, Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Medieval Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He was founder and past president of the interdisciplinary Society for Textual Scholar-ship and co-editor of its journal, Text. He is the author of Textual Scholarship: An Intro-duction (1994), Textual Transgressions (1998), Theories of the Text (1999), and other works, and wrote the most recent essay on “Textual Scholarship” for the MLA’s Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Literatures and Languages. He is currently working on copyright theory and practice as it affects textual studies.

Robert A. Gross holds the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. A social and cultural historian focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, he is the author of Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord (1988) and The Minutemen and their World (25th anniversary edn. 2001). He is a member of the general editorial board of A History of the Book in America,sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society, and co-editor with Mary Kelley of the second volume in the series, An Extensive Republic: Books, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (forthcoming).

Deana Heath is a lecturer in South Asian and World History at Trinity College Dublin. She has published a number of articles on censorship, sexuality, and govern-mentality in India, Australia, and Britain, and is currently working on a book on the governmentalization of the obscene in all three contexts.

xii Notes on Contributors

Lotte Hellinga was until 1995 a deputy keeper at the British Library. Her publications include The Fifteenth-century Printing Types of the Low Countries (1966, jointly with her late husband Wytze Hellinga), Caxton in Focus (1982), and, most recently, the “England” volume of the Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century now in the British Museum(2007). She edited jointly with J. B. Trapp, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,volume 3 (1999).

T. H. Howard-Hill, who is editor of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America,has published nine volumes of the Index to British Literary Bibliography (1969–99) and contributed to the forthcoming Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. His multi-volume The British Book Trade, 1475–1890: A Bibliography is expected to be published by the British Library in 2007.

Peter Kornicki is Professor of Japanese History and Bibliography at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (1998), Catalogue of the Early Japanese Books in the Russian State Library, 2 vols. (1999, 2004), and The Iwakura Embassy, 1871–3, vol. 4 (2002). He set up and maintains the bilingual Union Catalogue of Early Japanese Books in Europe website, and is currently working on vernacularization and publishing for women in seventeenth-century Japan.

Beth Luey is Director Emerita of the Scholarly Publishing Program at Arizona State University, and an editorial consultant in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books, including Handbook for Academic Authors (4th edn., 2002) and Revising your Dissertation (2004). She has served as president of the Association for Documentary Editing and of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

Paul Luna is Professor of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where he teaches the practice, theory, and history of the subject. His research centers on the design of complex texts such as dictionaries. While design manager for Oxford University Press, he designed the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the Revised English Bible, and many trade series. He has recently designed the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and published the fi rst serious appraisal of the typographic design of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.

Russell L. Martin III is Director of the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist Uni-versity. He contributed to volume 1 of A History of the Book in America (2000) and has pub-lished other articles and reviews on bibliographical matters. He is at work on an edition of the poems of Jacob Taylor, compiler of almanacs in eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

Jean-Yves Mollier is Professor of Contemporary History and Director of the Doctoral Program in Cultures, Organizations and Laws at the University of Versailles Saint-

Notes on Contributors xiii

Quentin-en-Yvelines, where he also helped found the Centre d’Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines, which he directed from 1998 to 2005. He specializes in nineteenth-century subjects on which he has published numerous books, including Louis Hachette (1800–1864), le fondateur d’un empire (1999) and La Lecture et ses publics àl’époque contemporaine (2002).

Angus Phillips is Director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies and Head of the Publishing Department at Oxford Brookes University. He is a member of the International Advisory Committee for the International Conference on the Book and a member of the editorial advisory board for the International Journal of the Book.He has written articles on the Internet, book covers, and the role of the publishing editor. He is the editor, with Bill Cope, of The Future of the Book in the Digital Age (2006), and the author, with Giles Clark, of Inside Book Publishing (2008).

Eleanor Robson is a university lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. A major focus of her research is the social history of literacy and numeracy in ancient Iraq and its neighbors. She is the author of Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100–1600 BC

(1999) and co-author, with Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, and Gábor Zólyomi, of The Literature of Ancient Sumer (2004).

Cornelia Roemer is Director of the Vienna Papyrus Collection and Papyrus Museum in the Austrian National Library. Before joining the team in the library, she was the curator of the Cologne Papyrus Collection and had taught for several years at University College London. Her main interests in papyrology are literary texts and the uses of writing in Greco-Roman Egypt.

Jonathan Rose is Professor of History at Drew University. He was the founding presi-dent of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and is co-editor of the journal Book History. His publications include British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1965 (1991), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001), and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001).

Emile G. L. Schrijver is curator of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, the Hebraica and Judaica special collection at Amsterdam University Library. He is editor-in-chief of the yearbook Studia Rosenthaliana and serves on the boards of related national and international institutions. He has published on the history of the Hebrew book in general, and on Hebrew manuscripts in particular. He has catalogued for auctioneers, book dealers, and private collectors, and has contributed to numerous international exhibitions.

David J. Shaw is Secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and previously taught French at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is a former

xiv Notes on Contributors

president of the Bibliographical Society and writes particularly on the history of the book in France in the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Graham Shaw is Head of Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections at the British Library. His particular fi eld of research is the history of printing and publishing in South Asia. Apart from many articles on the subject, he has published Printing in Calcutta to 1800(1981) and The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB): Stage 1: 1556–1800 (1987), and was co-compiler of Publications Proscribed by the Government of India (1985). Most recently, he has completed a study of censorship in India and its circumvention under the British Raj from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Claire Squires is Senior Lecturer in Publishing in the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University, and Programme Leader for the MA in Publishing. Her publications include Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials (2006) and Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (2007).

Rietje van Vliet writes as a freelance research journalist for various media about higher education in the Netherlands. In 2005, she took her PhD at the University of Leiden for her dissertation “Elie Luzac (1721–1796): Boekverkoper van de Verlichting.” She has, among other subjects, published about Dutch hacks, propaganda in the Dutch revolu-tion of 1783–99, and Dutch–German book-trade relations. She is currently working on a research project about the eighteenth-century Amsterdam bookseller Marc-Michel Rey.

James Wald is Associate Professor of History at Hampshire College, where he directs the Center for the Book. He is also a member of the board of the Massachusetts Center for the Book and treasurer of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

Rowan Watson is a curator in the National Art Library, part of the Word and Image Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has published works on illumi-nated manuscripts, and on illustrated and artists’ books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He teaches in the History of the Book program at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Alexis Weedon is the author of Victorian Publishing: Book Publishing for the Mass Market 1836–1916 (2003) and co-editor of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. She is Professor of Publishing Studies and Direc-tor of the Research Institute for Media Art and Design at the University of Bedford-shire. Her research interests include the economics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing, the publishing industry and cross-media integration, and online bookselling.

Notes on Contributors xv

Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Recent Dutch Book History at the University of Leiden. His research interests include Anglo-Dutch relations in the field of the book; the production, distribution, and consumption of popular and trivial literature; and digital textual transmission. He edits the yearbook of the Dutch Book Historical Society.

Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University. He is the author of “An Active Instrument for Propaganda”: American Public Libraries during World War I(1988) and Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (1996). He is co-editor with James P. Danky of Print Culture in a Diverse America (1998), with Thomas Augst of Libraries as Agencies of Culture (2001), and with Anne Lundin of Defi ning Print Culture for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children’s Literature (2003).

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she held a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship between 2002 and 2006. Her most recent book is No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (2004).

xvi Notes on Contributors

The history of the book is a new scholarly adventure, still in its pioneering phase, which offers an innovative approach to studying both history and literature. It is based on two apparently simple premises, which have inspired some strikingly original work in the humanities. The fi rst is that books make history. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that the invention of print technology made possible the scientific revolution, mobilized the Protestant Reformation, and broadcast the achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Meanwhile, Robert Darnton was making the case that scurrilous underground literature undermined France’s ancien régime to the point where it collapsed in 1789. They inspired other scholars to pose similar questions about books and historical causation. Did escalating press rhetoric precipitate the French Reign of Terror and the American Civil War? Did samizdat literature contribute to the implosion of Soviet communism? Can the arrested development of Middle Eastern print culture, hemmed in by censorship, help to explain problems of modernization in that part of the world? Book historians do not claim that books explain everything, but they do recognize that books are the primary tools that people use to transmit ideas, record memories, create narratives, exercise power, and distribute wealth. (That remained true even in the twentieth century, when cinematic, broadcast, sound recording, and digital media became increasingly pervasive.) Therefore, when we study any literate human society, we must ask what books it produced, where they were distributed, which libraries held them, how they were censored (or smuggled past the censors), where and how they were translated, and who was reading them. We should also be aware that readers can read the same book in a variety of ways, with important conse-quences: after all, wars have been fought over differing interpretations of scriptures and treaties.

Conversely, books are made by history: that is, they are shaped by economic, politi-cal, social, and cultural forces. No book is created solely by its author: printers, publish-ers, literary agents, editors, designers, and lawyers all play a role in molding the fi nal product. Critics, booksellers, and educational bureaucrats can proclaim a book a classic

IntroductionSimon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

2 Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

or consign it to oblivion. And every writer must take into account the demands of the reading public and the laws of literary property.

These issues have engaged a growing body of scholars working in a range of fields: history, literature, librarianship, art, sociology, religion, anthropology. Recently, these scholars have come together to build the apparatus of a new academic discipline of their own, including undergraduate and graduate courses, monographs, textbooks, bibliog-raphies, conferences, and journals. In 1991, they organized the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), whose website (www.sharpweb.org) is the most comprehensive and up-to-the-minute source of information about the world of book historians. Academics have worked collectively on multivolume national histo-ries of the book in France, Britain, the United States, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. What has been lacking is a wider, more comparative history of the book, surveying all historical periods, distilling the best of recent scholarship. We have designed this volume to fi ll that gap. Our intended audience includes specialists, stu-dents, and lay readers alike – in fact, anyone who needs a broad, general introduction to the whole field of book history and the questions that it addresses.

Book history uses the word “book” in its widest sense, covering virtually any piece of written or printed text that has been multiplied, distributed, or in some way made public. This means that a book historian is interested in graffi ti on a wall in Pompeii as well as in a letter by Cicero, in an eighteenth-century German chapbook as well as in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, in a catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 as well as in a fi rst edition of David Copperfi eld. Given the discipline’s breadth and depth, and in order to make this very rich subject fully accessible, we offer a number of dif-ferent but complementary ways of approaching it.

Part I, “Methods and Approaches,” introduces the reader to a number of techniques used by book historians and allied specialists, ranging from the long-established dis-ciplines of bibliography and textual scholarship to newer, frequently IT-based, approaches such as bibliometrics.

Part II, “The History of the Material Text,” offers a chronological survey of the forms and content of books from the third millennium bc to the third millennium ad. It is too easy for us to think of the “book” as always having looked like the volume that we today take off a library shelf or buy in an airport lounge: a “codex” to use the jargon. However, for roughly the fi rst three thousand years of its existence, the “book” would most usually have taken the form of a clay tablet or a roll of papyrus. The section “The World before the Codex” therefore begins with two chapters that study this long and important stage in the evolution of the material text, too often overlooked by those of us brought up on the Western codex. Similarly, and all too frequently, book historians in the West (and by this we mean mostly Europe, North America, and Australasia) devote themselves exclusively to their relatively small part of the world. However, we forget the book beyond these narrow confi nes at our intellectual peril. The section “The Book beyond the West” therefore has chapters devoted to China, to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, to South Asia, and to Latin America, which, though it became an extension of Western print culture after the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, had

Introduction 3

a long and separate textual culture before that event. This section also focuses on two important religious and linguistic traditions of the book that mainly employ non-Roman alphabets: the Hebraic and the Islamic book. The section “The Codex in the West 400–2000” returns to more familiar territory to study the evolution of the codex from the early centuries of the fi rst millennium to the present day.

Part III, “Beyond the Book,” moves us away from conventional forms to look at other types of text that are less traditional but no less important: the development of peri-odicals and periodical publishing; the signifi cance of all sorts of ephemeral printing, and the emergence of new textual technologies from the microform revolution through CD-ROMs to the World Wide Web.

Finally, Part IV, “Issues,” discusses broader themes, including the concept of literary property, the relationship between obscenity and censorship, the book as an aesthetic and ritual object, and the nature and function of the library. The Companion concludes with an exploration of what the book might become in the future.

A common theme runs through every chapter in this volume: that is, the book has always been inextricably embedded in the material world. Though literary critics and theorists feel able to talk about a text as though it were some disembodied entity, for the book historian the text always takes an embodied form. In entering the world of things, a text becomes an object created out of certain materials and taking character-istic forms (a clay tablet, a papyrus roll, a parchment codex, a printed book on paper, an image on a screen). The manufacturing of a book using these materials is a process through which the nature and cost of the materials, and the strengths and weaknesses of the human beings using them, will infl uence the product, sometimes to the extent of modifying or signifi cantly changing the original text and thus its meaning.

Embodying the text has two contrary effects. It becomes fi xed, unlike most oral performances. It can also be copied, though copying opens up the possibility of varia-tions, intended or accidental. But once written down, even those variations seem to claim an authority through permanence that orality cannot (and probably would not wish to) match. Some texts remain pretty fi rmly fi xed: quite often those that are copied only a very few times or exist in few places, such as the early texts of the Book of the Dead carved in the walls of Egyptian tombs or the Chinese texts inscribed in stone which could be copied by means of a rubbing. Some cultures in India have preserved, through a tradition of very careful copying, a culture of limited textual variation, as have the Jewish and Islamic traditions of meticulous scribal reproduction. But in most other cultures, the more copies, the more variations; the more generations through which a text passes, the more errors, as though book production were some epic game of Chinese whispers (or “telephone” as it is sometimes known) conducted over time and through space.

Distribution is another aspect of the inescapable materiality of books. Until the coming of the railways in the nineteenth century, transport, particularly of vulnerable and often bulky merchandise such as books, was usually slow, difficult, and conse-quently expensive. Until the arrival of mass literacy and mass production in the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries, the number of people who could afford to buy books

4 Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

within a modest ride of the place of production was often too small to represent a profitable market, so books had to travel great distances to sell suffi cient copies. It is quite possible, for instance, that the fi rst book printed on movable type in the West, Gutenberg’s forty-two-line Bible, would not have sold so well without the easy transport route to other parts of Europe offered by the Rhine. Getting books to their markets, how they are sold when they get there, their place of sale, their price, and the other goods that are sold with them are all material factors that concern our contributors.

For much of the past, many books, unless they were single sheets or small rolls or pamphlets, were relatively expensive. As an alternative to outright purchase, readers often borrowed, rented, or perused reading matter in (for example) bookshops, libraries, and coffee houses. Such different physical circumstances of reading would have influ-enced to a signifi cant extent what the reader derived from it. In fact, readers, even in the best and most comfortable circumstances, often read and use books in ways unin-tended by their makers: reading inevitably generates difference, diversity, and dissen-sion. No wonder books, unless their production and distribution are under strict control, have often been regarded as potentially dangerous and in need of control or censorship for religious, political, or moral reasons – or for a mix of the three.

As books spread out, a counter-movement becomes evident. This is the desire to bring copies together: to collect, to compare, to preserve, to edit, to control, to censor. If not quite as early as the earliest books, libraries, in the form of archives that contained mainly bureaucratic records but also preserved versions of myth-based literature, can be found as early as 2250 bc (Casson 2001: 3). But even the grandest and the oldest collections, such as the Alexandrian Library, faltered, declined, and had their collections dispersed. And so the distribution of their books began again.

As we can see from the contents of early Sumerian collections, texts in the past were, as they still are today, overwhelmingly practical and functional. “Literature” tends to come later and always occupies a smaller part of most collections. Indeed, even in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, when literature in general and fiction in particular became so commercially signifi cant, no more than a fraction of all titles was devoted to it. This Companion gives due attention to non-fiction publishing, ranging from textbooks to timetables.

Access to books has always been a pressing and difficult matter, and this is why institutional collections in royal palaces, schools, monasteries, great men’s houses, uni-versities, and local public libraries have always been so important. But it also explains why, at various stages in history, attempts have been made to make texts cheaper. The introduction of printing in mid-fi fteenth-century Europe, and particularly the applica-tion of steam power to printing and papermaking in the early nineteenth century, made real mass production possible. There is, however, much earlier evidence for cheap books: the text of a play in classical Athens, a cheap leaf or two from the Book of the Dead in Ptolemaic Egypt, a collection of Martial’s poems in imperial Rome. However, much of what was cheapest and most readily available has not survived: as with most histori-cal evidence, it is the best and most valuable that has tended to be preserved. But, by good luck, just occasionally one can perceive – in the dust heaps of Oxyrhynchus, in a

Introduction 5

poorly copied student text of the late medieval period, in a seventeenth-century news-paper, or a Victorian advertising poster – the remarkable world of cheap and accessible texts that we have mostly lost.

Most forms of text (very special forms, such as Buddhist scriptures, excepted) have a value in history because of their potential to be read or used in some way or other. However important the author, the manufacturer, the distributor, the seller, or the librarian, books would mean little without readers or users of books. Thinking about readers in history raises the difficult problem of how one determines literacy rates in cultures and times remote from our own: what proportion of the population could read or (a very different question) write? Still more challenging is the recovery of the actual experience of past readers: how did they interpret and respond to The Waste Land, dime novels, The Social Contract, the Qur’an? In what sources can we find evidence of some-thing so internal and non-material as reading? This may be one of the most intriguing questions that book historians confront, and this Companion reports some fascinating answers.

Yet reading is only one of many ways of accessing a text. We should not underesti-mate oral and aural traditions, which did not cease when writing was invented. Right up to the present day, many people have had their fi rst and sometimes only experience of a text by hearing it. The oral delivery of text has a lively history even in the most literate of societies: monks of the Benedictine order listening to readings as they worked, a newspaper being read out in a pub by the most literate member of a group of working men, the enormous success in the past few decades of audio books on cassettes and CDs. Just as writing complemented rather than replaced orality, so too manuscript culture did not vanish when printing arrived. Many collections of high-status verse were circulated in Italy in the sixteenth century and in England in the seventeenth century in manuscript rather than be subject to the vulgar and commercial process of printing. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers often compiled handwritten com-monplace books in which favorite verse and prose would be laboriously copied out to create an individualized anthology of texts. Writing is vital in that frequent dialogue between a published author and a reader (sometimes an exasperated one) which often takes the form of handwritten notes or marks in the margin of a printed text. In addi-tion, such dialogues often provide an invaluable form of evidence for reading experience in the past. This Companion recognizes that book history involves a continuous interplay of orality, writing, and print.

The book is a survivor. Over its more than five thousand years of history it has moved from one material form to another and spread to almost all cultures and climes. It has taken on roles and then relinquished them. It has recorded, informed, entertained, provoked, inspired, and outraged. In the past couple of centuries it has been threatened with extinction by the telegraph, by the cinema, by radio, by television, and by com-puters and the Internet. It rarely meets these challenges head on but, like the endlessly protean form that it is, it adapts and reconfigures and comes back in new forms offering new services. The computer may be the book’s latest challenger, but go into any book-shop and look at the rows of books devoted to getting the best out of your computer,

6 Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

or its software, or its peripherals. Go to any newsagent and count the number of maga-zines devoted to the use of that very electronic hardware that was supposed to replace the book. As virtually every book historian who has given a public lecture will attest, the question of whether or not the book as we know it has a future is almost always the fi rst and most pressing question asked. Given the book’s adaptability and its ability to migrate from one material form to another, one might be inclined to be optimistic. However, whatever the future of the book may be, we hope that you, the reader, having perused this volume, will agree that the book has had quite a past.

References

Casson, Lionel (2001) Libraries in the Ancient World.New Haven: Yale University Press.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1979) The Printing Press as

an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Methods and Approaches

Year by year millions of copies of books are published and distributed to all the coun-tries of the world. Books are printed on paper, on vellum or parchment, on wood, and on metal: any surface capable of bearing ink can carry text. The common codex – a collection of leaves hinged at the left – is given paper covers, or none, or covers of cloth, pasteboard, plastic, leather, or even human skin. Books are disseminated to institutions, warehouses, bookshops, libraries, private collections, and households so that they are omnipresent: it is unusual for anyone to be far from books. Books are among the most widely dispersed artifacts in world culture, and the book is still the commonest form of transmitting information and knowledge.

It is primarily the task of bibliographers to deal with the flood of books that issues from the world’s presses. Bibliographers are the good housekeepers of the world of books. Even though most books declare their origin and auspices on the title page or its verso, bibliographers must determine a host of crucial details that many people would think transparently obvious. There are books with title pages in unexpected places and books without title pages at all. Many books do not have clear author statements. Many offi cial publications, for instance, credit the contributions of so many committees, com-missions, departments, and offices that it is difficult to decide which of them gives the books their author-ness or authority. A signifi cant portion of popular modern books such as novels are published pseudonymously; unless authors’ real names are discovered, such authors will be deprived of part of their work and their literary biographies will be inadequate. This is only one area in which potential obscurities in the identifi cation of a book must be resolved.

In order to put books – or at least bibliographical records – in their right places, at the very least bibliographers must establish who wrote a book or at least assumed intel-lectual responsibility for its content; its title (if it is a translation, the title in the original language); the edition (whether the book has been published before and where the edition stands in relation to the title’s previous publishing history); the place of publica-tion and the name of the publisher (that is, the issuing body); and the date of publica-tion, possibly the most crucial datum of all, about which more will be said.

The process of putting books into their right places and of recording where they are is bibliographical control. Without such fundamental instruments of bibliographical

1

Why Bibliography MattersT. H. Howard-Hill

10 T. H. Howard-Hill

control as bibliographies (lists of books) and catalogues (libraries’, booksellers’, publish-ers’), and their modern extensions into cyberspace, particularly as databases and OPACs (online publicly accessible catalogues), the complex modern literary culture that we take for granted would scarcely exist. Without these tools, which the Internet is making more widely and usefully accessible, the information explosion of the past decade or so could not have occurred. Modern students are more familiar with electronic databases (for instance, the MLA International Bibliography or the English Short Title Catalogue [ESTC]) than catalogues and bibliographies, but in most cases they depend on print. Historians of the book particularly should not neglect the printed works that lie behind the electronic records, or the artifacts that underlie the printed records.

Bibliographical control probably began when an individual or an institution had too many books to recall their titles or their position in the collection. To classify or even to arrange books on a shelf in alphabetical order of authors’ names or titles is a form of bibliographical control whether or not the arrangement is accompanied by a written list. However, early librarians found that it was not effi cient to arrange all their books, ranging from huge elephant folios to miniature books like thumbnail Bibles, in a single sequence on the shelves. It was better to classify the books by size or form (as maps are in most large libraries). Alternative forms of classifi cation could be considered, from which arose the considerable physical complexity of modern libraries, where catalogues must reveal not only which books are in the collection but where they might be found. Librarians are the foremost of the bibliographers who exert control over the multifarious products of the world’s presses.

So the merest neophyte in book history studies is already the benefi ciary of three or more thousand years of bibliographical activity: the discipline of bibliography has a long history and an extensive literature. Its essence is taxonomy (classifi cation), which bibliography shares with such studies as botany, paleontology, and astronomy, and therefore depends on logical principles common to most sciences. Of this kind is enu-merative (or systematic) bibliography, analytical (or critical) bibliography, and descriptivebibliography, to employ common distinctions (Stokes 1969). The greatest English bib-liographer of the fi rst part of the twentieth century enlarged the simple defi nition of bibliography to “the science of the transmission of literary documents” (Greg 1966: 241, see also 75–88, 207–25, 239–66). Therefore, often regarded as a further division of bibliography is textual bibliography, in which bibliographers or textual critics study the taxonomy of the texts that are transmitted through documents that may have a different taxonomy. Finally, there is historical bibliography, which in itself is basically not taxonomic. (This chapter and the illustrative examples it cites necessarily depend on my experience with British books and bibliography.)

Enumerative Bibliography

Bibliographers, particularly enumerative bibliographers – those who make lists or cata-logues of books – consider books from several viewpoints. Titles can be selected for

Why Bibliography Matters 11

inclusion in a bibliography on the basis of their period of publication: hence the well-known printed short title catalogues of English books printed 1475–1640 (Pollard and Redgrave 1976–91) and 1641–1700 (Wing 1972–88) and lists of incunables (books printed before 1500). There are lists of books written or printed in particular languages(for instance, Lloyd 1948), or printed or published in particular places (Cordeaux and Merry 1981), or produced by particular printers or publishers or binders (Isaac 1989), or printed in particular types (Carter 1967), or – too common to require illustration – books written by individual authors or classes of authors like women or children. And, of course, innumerable bibliographies gather together records of books on particular sub-jects. Of paramount importance to historians of the book are the bibliographies that take bibliography and book history as their subjects. A principal example for English bibliography is Howard-Hill (1969–99); for American bibliography, Tanselle (1971). These bibliographies are readily approached through such general reference guides as Harner (2002).

All of these bibliographical attributes can exist in different combinations in a single bibliography. However, in every instance, the compilation of a list depends on the bib-liographical (analytical) examination of copies of books. The longest bibliography starts with the fi rst copy. Not even book historians appreciate the extent to which their work depends on the products of enumerative bibliography: that is, lists of books. Enumera-tive bibliographies and library catalogues are constructed from descriptions of copies of individual books that are taken to represent, more or less faithfully, individual works that contain distinct texts. Incorporating the products of analytical and descriptive bibliography, it is enumerative bibliography that provides the basic material for the history of books. If books incorporate the collective memory of humankind – that is, preserve what is worth preserving – then without enumerative bibliographies access to the record of civilization would be random: civilization itself would experience a kind of Alzheimer’s disease. Enumerative bibliographers and library cataloguers bind together the elements of civilization and society, providing access that magnifi es the power of each element. The increasing sophistication of libraries and the development of biblio-graphical method exactly parallel the progress of civilization as we know it, not merely as a consequence but as an essential enabling factor. More narrowly, as book historians participate in the extension of knowledge, they build on foundations erected by bibliographers.

I will elaborate more specifi cally. Usually, bibliographical description for any purpose starts with a single copy of a document. (I will use “bibliographer” for “cataloguer” mostly hereafter.) Identifi cation of the copy to hand is the fi rst concern of the bibliog-rapher. When the cataloguing is “original” (that is, when the bibliographer is not simply matching the copy to hand against a description written by someone else), identifi cation may not be easy, particularly if the work itself was hitherto unknown to bibliographical history. Information suffi cient to identify the work or book may be lacking or be false, or the bibliographer may not have the means to make a correct identifi cation. To illus-trate this, there are records of twenty-five Hookham and Company Circulating Library catalogues, scattered amongst eleven libraries in my database. For all but three of the

12 T. H. Howard-Hill

catalogues, the dates are conjectural, in some instances pro forma. For instance, the Bodleian Library conjectures “[1829]” for a volume (Bodleian Library 2590 e.Lond.186.1) that consists of a catalogue that contains “Addenda 1821” and a separate 1829 supple-ment with its own pagination, register, and printer. The Bodleian cataloguer apparently dated the book 1829 as the year in which the three parts were issued together, but that obscures the fact that the volume was produced in three different years.

Further, the extent of anonymous and pseudonymous books in the early period is considerable and the bibliographer may have great diffi culty in determining what the authority of such a book is (Griffi n 1999). Many books lack much of the information that may allow a bibliographer readily to put them into their historical context exactly. Of 10,904 monographs recorded in my database in June 2002, 1,058 (roughly 10 percent) did not identify the author on the title page, 129 were pseudonymous, 1,407 were anonymous, 2,672 did not supply the place of publication, 2,587 did not give the name of the publisher or printer, 2,293 did not give the date of publication, and in 1,087 records the date of publication is doubtful. Identifying such books is essentially an historical enterprise because the author of an anonymous or pseudonymous book can rarely be identified without recourse to external biographical or literary information. Sometimes also the bibliographer must interpret the text of the document, as in the case of Proposals by the Drapers and Stationers, for the Raising and Improving the Woollen Manufacture, and Making of Paper in England (1677), a broadside signed “H. 1000000”, that is, Henry Million (Wing 1972–83: no. P3715D).

A glance at the National Union Catalog (NUC), in which square brackets are employed to denote information not supplied by the title page, illustrates the extent to which the fundamental basis of authority in intellectual discourse is the creation of bibliographers operating within and on book culture. In an age in which accountability is a prevalent social concern, the bibliographer’s attribution of authority and therefore responsibility for the contents of books has larger than bibliographical relevance. In earlier times, when the press was often under state control, the consequences of a bibliographer’s attribution of responsibility for works were generally more serious. Bibliographers interpret the individual written responses to the common (human) condition and, by interpreting and classifying them, enable readers to participate fully in the world’s business. Further, a work may survive in only a few copies, but the record of its existence is disseminated in a multitude of bibliographical descriptions that may even sometimes be more numerous than the number of copies of the work originally printed: such dis-semination enlarges immeasurably the work’s possible intellectual infl uence. Enumera-tive bibliographies amplify the effects of books in all communities.

A catalogue or bibliography is fundamentally a work of historical interpretation, as can be seen even more clearly when we consider the bibliographer’s paramount obliga-tion to place a book in its correct place in history. Just as many early books are anony-mous, so were many issued without a statement of the date of issue. A date may not have been perceived to be necessary at the time for purchasers, for the publishers knew when it was published and the readers knew when they read it as a contemporary docu-ment. This is particularly true of early library catalogues, in which modern book